If you're looking for a solution to a problem that no existing business has addressed...
Consider taking the entrepreneurial route to not only find the solution but also to establish a business that adds value to the market. When you start on the journey of building a startup and becoming a successful entrepreneur, it offers limitless potential for success and takes you on an exhilarating path through unexplored areas of business.
Entrepreneurial leaders start their journey with just an idea and a clear picture of where they want to go. They motivate others who believe in their vision and work together to turn their idea into a successful business. In other words, you could say, it is a journey of collaboration, innovation, and determination to create something meaningful and impactful. That is why having strong leaders in command is essential for navigating the challenges and seizing the opportunities that lie ahead in the startup journey.
Why is it important to have a good leader for startups?
A good leader is always a good listener. The leaders need to create an environment for the team members where they are encouraged enough to discuss the problems that are faced without hesitation. Understanding the pain points and finding the best possible solution collaboratively, make the teams work more efficiently and produce the best possible result. Some key points that a good leader should attend to:
- Team engagement
- Boosting the team spirit
- Nurturing a positive company culture
- Innovation in the business
- Formulating a vision
- Recognizing the opportunities and making maximum use of them
- Risk assessment
- Finance and investment
- Networking
- Leading from the front
Increase your work efficiency with some prominent tools
Digitization of the work process with various tools helps in driving the company’s innovation and growth at a faster pace. Some of the key factors that keep the business competitive and successful are- a potential decrease in the cost as the work processes are short-term and more efficient without sacrificing the quality, an increase in productivity due to smoother operations, a motivated workforce, and many more. Let’s take a look at some of the tools that can help in increasing work efficiency.
1. Communication Tools
Google Meet
Google Meet is a video communication tool provided by Google. Anyone with a Google account can create a meeting with up to 100 users that can last for any amount of time. The users are provided with the features like streaming HD video, sharing screens, recording meetings, starting a chat, hosts can deny entry and remove users during the call, and many more.
Zoom
Zoom Meetings is another widely used video communication tool. The free plan provides video conferences for up to 100 users at once, with a 40-minute time limit, if there are more than two participants, and for longer or larger meetings with more features, paid subscriptions are available. You can also record the meetings and change the background, which has now become a trend.
Slack
Slack is messaging tool designed specifically for business communication. It provides instant messaging features with different channels that can be organized by topic, private groups, and one-on-one messaging. Users can add emojis to their messages, and others can also add reactions to them. Slack free plans allow users to view and search up to recent 10,000 messages but can buy the paid plans which provide more features including voice and video calls.
2. Product Management Tools
Shorter Loop
Shorter Loop is an intuitive Generative AI-powered all-in-one customer-centric saas product management platform that helps companies of ALL sizes to streamline their product management activities while keeping in mind customers’ expectations. Powered by Agile Product Management, Design Thinking.
The platform comes equipped with a variety of frameworks, models, and techniques that modern businesses and teams across the globe need to create assumptions, and hypotheses and test those assumptions by creating experiments and launching these to their target audience to validate these further by mapping their needs and wants.
Gathering customers’ feedback at an early stage (discovery stage), and basis that, iterate, fine-tune the idea validates the product’s market fit. Not only that, it ties it back to business and revenue goals making the product NOT a failure and customers will be willing to pay for it. It helps them to discover customers’ problems better and build those types of products that can solve customer pains in real time.
With Shorter Loop, users can develop products that their customers actually want. They can validate hypotheses, collect evidence and share them with the whole team. Further, teams can create a backlog of features, put them in a sequence and prioritize them based on a clear strategy. These strategies can be made with business goals and proven insights.
Shorter Loop helps businesses to launch products on time and as per budget. It helps users to solve problems regarding their products that are appreciated by customers. The platform also helps product managers from start-ups, SMB and enterprises to create a complete picture of their products and improve the quality of their services.
Features provided by Shorter Loop:
- Discover -
- Product Vision
- Persona
- Value Proposition
- Business Model
- Define -
- Impact Map
- Plan -
- Roadmap
- Prioritization
- Use Story Map
- Product Backlog
- Whiteboard
- Idea Management
- Idea Manager
Sign up for Free on Shorter Loop, an End-to-end Product Management Platform, and manage your product efficiently!
3. Design Tools
Figma
Figma is a design tool for graphics editing and prototyping. You can design, and share the work among the teams to be on the same page. Figma is a tool that mainly focuses on User-Interface and User-Experience design with real-time collaboration.
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Illustrator is another design tool that helps in editing graphics and design pro programs can create different logos, icons, designs, and complex illustrations while expressing your creativity with different, shapes, colors, and typography.
Canva
Canva is a widely used and in-trend designing tool with which you can create logos, posters, photo collages, cards, graphs, and more for your social media, presentations, articles, documents, and other visual content. You can also edit your photos and videos with real-time collaboration so that your team can be on the same page. Canva provides thousands of templates for different tasks to make you work more efficiently in the free version but more professional templates in the paid version.
4. Scheduling Tools
Calendly
Calendly is a simple yet efficient tool for scheduling your business meetings and events. You can schedule meetings without any haste and avoid the time delay in exchanging this back and forth and can directly send your availability time-slot link. Calendly also provides the feature to have meeting polls for the invitees to vote on their preferred times before scheduling.
5. CRM Tools
Hubspot CRM
Hubspot CRM is a tool that helps businesses organize and manage their customer relations by tracking their leads and building a database so that businesses can have a clear understanding of the customers in the buying process. This makes it easy to personalize the course of action with the CRM data for more impactful work from all the teams. You can work on the free version with few features, but you can always go for the paid version if your team requires additional features.
Zoho CRM
Zoho is an all-in-one CRM solution that connects your sales, marketing, and service teams on a single platform. Zoho provides the flexibility to license your CRM for different users separately in sales, service, and marketing and still can gain interest on a single platform. They also offer a comprehensive CX Suite plan that gives each CRM user access to all of the product’s functionalities.
6. Software Development Tools
GitHub
GitHub is one of the known tools for software development among startups. GitHub is the place where engineers can develop, collaborate, and host or review their codes together. It provides access control and many more collaboration features like bug tracking, feature request, task management, and continuous integration for every single project without compromising any features’ form and maximizing efficiency.
Bootstrap
Bootstrap is a strong front-end framework used for creating and building web pages and web applications with a powerful toolkit collection of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It’s an easy-to-use tool with key advantages like its being responsive by design, maintaining wide browser compatibility, and offerings consistent design by using reusable components. It is a free and open-source project, hosted on GitHub, and created by(and for) Twitter.
7. Presentation Tools
Google Slides
Google Slides helps you create, edit, collaborate, and present from any place free of charge. It helps you to stand out your creative ideas with diverse themes present, hundreds of fonts, embedded videos, animations, and more.
8. Marketing Tools
Intercom
Intercom is a customer communication platform where you can personally communicate with your customers who visit your website with selected content, personal messages and targeted emails, and conversational support. Personalized communication makes these leads turn into active and valuable customers.
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is a free SEO tool that can track and improve your SEO traffic by keeping track of your monthly keyword search volume, CPC, and competition data. You can get insights into the strategies working better in the market and adapt them to increase your SEO traffic. The free plan of ubersuggest is pretty generous, but you can go for the paid plan if you want the daily rank tracking of your keywords.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an easy tool that tracks and reports website traffic. It’s a web analytics service provided by Google. With strong web analytics and reporting tools, Google Analytics can help you make the most out of visitors and potentially turn them into customers. Anyone with a Google account can access Google Analytics easily.
Conclusion
Numerous startups come to life worldwide. But, according to studies, the rate of failure is still more than 70%. There are various reasons for startups to fail. Here comes the role of the entrepreneurial leader that ensures that they as a team emerge as a successful company. They should start with a vision of what problem to solve and then move backward to design and develop their products. Empathizing with customers and redirecting their path according to their needs, makes these entrepreneurial leaders exceptional.
For startup entrepreneurs, reaching success can be tough. They face many challenges like obstacles, dead-ends, and unexpected changes. They need to be good at solving problems, coming up with new ideas, and finding the best solutions even with limited resources and tools.
Do you think you should begin your entrepreneurial journey by tackling a new problem or an existing one? Consider using a list of tools to help ease your workload.